All posts tagged: review

This past December a dozen artists, activists, and researchers converged at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry for a book sprint. Led by Addie Wagenknecht, the all-women cadre convened under the collective moniker Deep Lab, and set out to examine how the themes of privacy, security, surveillance, anonymity, and large-scale data aggregation are problematized in the arts, culture and society.

Montreal, the beginning of May, a dark performance space illuminated by an otherworldly glow; this combination of factors could only mean one thing – Elektra! CAN was on hand at the 14th edition of the venerable Canadian digital arts festival to soak up the proceedings and we’ve prepared the following overview of some of the (well, our) highlights.

We have 3 copies of “Nature of Code” by Daniel Shiffman – Natural systems using Processing to give away to CAN members. This wonderful book by Daniel Shiffman takes phenomena that naturally occur in our physical world and shows you how to simulate them with code. Nature of Code picks up where Daniel’s last book Learning Processing leaves off, […]

“The main change in the design process achieved by using generative design is that traditional craftsmanship recedes into the background, and abstraction and information become the new principal elements.”

“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” To a science fiction fan or film buff, that nugget of dialogue evokes big, sweeping conversations about the more ominous aspects of machine sentience. However, when the ensuing exchange is viewed through the lens of interaction design, a different conversation altogether takes place. A design-minded analyst would ignore HAL’s […]

Processing enthusiasts rejoice! There is a new book coming by Daniel Shiffman and it’s called Nature of Code. As it’s title implies this book takes phenomena that naturally occur in our physical world and shows you how to simulate them with code.

Rafeal Lozano-Hemmer is largely known for his large scale installations that invite audience participation. An extension of this participation is also how he takes elements of physical interaction and gives them digital or technological corollaries. His latest show at Bitforms Gallery is no different. Although, ironically, rather than taking something inherently physical, it takes the […]

Visualizations are created to make data more legible. They are intended to give us a neutral portrait, so to speak, of how collections of data relate to each other. In so doing, they make information accessible to us that would otherwise be obscured by its scale in a manner that is easily comprehended. Data is […]

The pundit scrum that massed around the New Aesthetic may not have yielded the overarching conversation about digital aesthetics that we needed to have in 2012, but it was the one we got. Fueled by the forward-thinking ‘curation’ of James Bridle’s tumblr and a related SXSW panel, interest in the New Aesthetic exploded after Bruce Sterling penned […]

Eyeo, eyeo, eyeo – well, where to begin? At the best of times providing an overarching review of a festival is an exercise in exclusion and cobbling together a vague impression of the second edition of Eyeo is no exception. In fact, one could say that Eyeo is pretty much a conference organized around the […]

The year is 2040 and it has been two decades since the American economy tanked. North America is a sprawling mega-slum and the population of the West is viewed as a massive, cheap labour force for China and India. This is the setup for Ghosts With Shit Jobs, Canadian author Jim Munroe’s self-described “lo-fi sci-fi” meditation […]

One need only look as far as the upstart GLI.TC/H festival and its vibrant constellation of related practitioners to see that the glitch aesthetic is alive and well. Rosa Menkman has been active as an artist, theorist, organizer and agitator within this milieu and at the tail end of last year she published The Glitch Moment(um), which […]